Bluff your way in crypto-speak

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If you think that peer to peer is a messaging system in the House of Lords or a hard fork is an unusually strong cutlery object, let's get it right.

Every company has its own jargon and the cryptocurrency is not different. In Silicon Valley they only talk about hackathons, burn rates, dog food and exit strategies. Cryptographic jargon is already almost strange.

If you really need to understand what you're talking about or just want to look like you're in the middle of some festive gathering, here's a beginner's guide on a key jargon to put in your conversation.

ASIC

(Pron. "Eh sick".) An application-specific integrated circuit: a specialized microchip designed for a particular function rather than the kind of general use you would need on a laptop, for example. ASICs are not exclusive to crypto but they are important in the encrypted world because they have been developed to be realized extraction (see below) more efficient.

Bitcoin SV

Bitcoin SV (BSV) is the cryptocurrency that we at CoinGeek support. There are others to choose from, but we prefer BSV because we believe it incorporates the original Bitcoin plan proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto. SV stands for Satoshi Vision.

Blockchain

An ever-increasing series of duplicate digital records in a computer network. It grows through the addition of "blocks" at the end of the "chain" from the process of extraction. The capacity of the additional block is filled with the last transactions.

cryptocurrency

What is encrypted about it? Well, the safety of a blockchain It depends on a software operation to solve mathematical problems. For example, something like this, "which number must be multiplied by x, to produce an answer that has particular properties?" It's like cryptography because it's very difficult to find an answer. To do this you need the test (or "hashing of an enormous number of possible solutions until you work. An important feature is that once an answer is found, it is easy to verify that it is correct. (Just as it is difficult to find the square root of a number, but if someone claims to have the answer, it's easy to confirm that it's right.)

Exchange

An encrypted exchange is a business that, just like a normal exchange of currency, for a fee, will convert between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies or a cryptocurrency to another.

Fiat Currency

Fiat is Latin for something like "let it be". Here, it refers to the traditional currencies incurred by national governments, the idea is that without that authority behind them, the legal currencies would not be considered reliable by users. This is in contrast to cryptocurrencies that are decentralized, in the sense that they do not depend on the policies of any central institution: technology itself guarantees transactions.

Hard fork

When a blockchain it branches off in two, that is a difficult fork. & # 39; difficult & # 39; in the sense that you can not go back to a single chain. So why should a fork happen? Well, that's because the transaction processing protocol has changed, perhaps because of disagreements about how the currency should develop or to invalidate transactions as a result of a security breach. After the fork, one of the resulting chains can prosper while the other becomes an "orphan" – still technically on the chain but no longer added to new blocks. Or both chains can continue but independently.

Hash rate

Hashing is the computer process in which a cryptocurrency is validated by the solution of a cryptographic puzzle. The competition exists between computers in a cryptographic network to solve the puzzle. The greater the number of tests per second performed by a computer (its rate of hashes), the greater the chances of being the first to solve the puzzle and to be rewarded – see proof of work.

ICO

An initial money supply, or "token sale", as an IPO – an initial public offering, the free float of the company's stock on the stock market – is a way for new cryptocurrencies to raise funds. Founders like ICO because they do not need to give up a share of their ownership of the company, as they do with venture capital funding. The company simply offers units of its new currency for sale. Investors hope that by entering early, they will buy at a great price. But this does not always work and ICOs are considered risky investments, so much so that Facebook and Google have banned their ads in January 2018 (a policy that Facebook has loosened a few months later).

ledger

A register is a transaction log – once hand-written in volumes bound in leather by Dickensian employees. In crypto, it refers to records that are compiled on a block, which can not therefore be modified.

Extraction

Computers that feed a cryptographic network are known as miners because, in return for maintaining the network, they are remunerated by the creation of new currency units. The more "work" they do, the more currency they have "mine" – or they lead to existence. There are complicated mechanisms that determine how profitable both the mining and the profitability ratio between the creation of currency and a second source of income for the miners, the transaction fees – a small percentage of each transaction that validate in a block.

Node

The idea of ​​decentralization depends on a network of computers that act as nodes. None of them has power over others and the information is shared, "peer to peer", traveling between the nodes through different paths. The network is strong because it does not depend on any particular node to function and the information it contains is secure because each computer contains a copy of all information on the network.

Private key, public key

If you make an online bank, you're probably not too fussy about who knows your bank account number and sort code. Well, this is the equivalent of a cryptographic public key. In both cases, money can be sent to you but not taken from you. It's like an address and it's public. The private key is like the passwords and numbers that you keep carefully to give you access to your bank account, not something you would like someone else to do. In a crypt wallet, private and public keys are both long strings of numbers and letters, but they have these very different security features.

Proof of work

This is the heart of Satoshi NakamotoThe system, an idea that brings together many of the elements described above. When a mining computer solves an enigma in front of the other nodes of the network, it is rewarded with units of new cryptocurrency encryption. At the same time he completes his new block with all the new transactions in it. The "work" uses power (electricity) to solve the puzzle with hashing. The other computers in the node then confirm that the solution is valid and accepts the new transaction record, until all the computers on the network have identical copies of the last confirmed transactions, as well as all those previously executed in the chain.

Satoshi Nakamoto

The original Bitcoin White Paper was written by someone (or people) who calls himself Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto has also contributed to various online forums over a period of time, but then disappeared from the online world, creating a decade-old mystery about who he was. Individuals have been "discovered" as Nakamoto only to deny it (including someone called Satoshi Nakamoto) while others have claimed to be him only for not believing their claims. Since the thought behind cryptocurrency is to free it from a central authority, perhaps the writer (s) has deliberately avoided announcing a special authority on the project.

token creation

In addition to recording cryptocurrency transactions, a blockchain can also be used as a secure registration of "token" transactions. Tokens can be created to represent fractions of all sorts of different assets that have a value, a bit like selling shares in a company. An entertainment activity could "make known the tickets it sells". Or it has been suggested that you could create tokens that represent shares of the value of your home.

Wallet

While a exchange It is a place to change money, a wallet – which you can download as an app on your phone – is a digital device day by day to send and receive crypt. There are many portfolios available, which differ in their interfaces and in some features but essentially do the same things. Try Centbee for a simple design and the ability to send crypto to your contacts easily (if they also have the wallet).

White paper

The original White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, published in 2008, is a nine-page proposal for Bitcoin ("a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic money"), complete with diagrams and references in academic style. Much of the work is technical, about security agreements for the network, but it is a suggestion of an idealistic vision in the comparison of the existing financial system, which "suffers from the intrinsic weaknesses of the trust-based model" with the new digital proposed system in the document.


The best way to make cryptographic language and the ideas behind it seem less strange is to dive and start using a currency. This means converting some money into a crypto, using an exchange, downloading a wallet, transferring your encryption into it and spending it. There are a lot of possibilities: you can use an encrypted supermarket to buy from big online retailers or just buy a beer in a bar.

The step by step guide of CoinGeek for beginners, from the first steps in the crypt to make a purchase:

1. My first cryptographic transaction
2. Playing with real money
3. Move encryption to a wallet
4. The purchase of a light bulb with a crypt

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) chain are called BTC coins. Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) is today the only implementation of Bitcoin following the original whitepaper of Satoshi Nakamoto for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BSV is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original Bitcoin vision as fast and frictionless electronic money.
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